The phrase “finish this quickly” really was something only Ao Run had the ability to say.
He did not change back into human form. He merely used a spell to shrink his enormous dragon body a little so that his towering horns would not crash into the niches along the cavern ceiling. As he swam forward, he introduced the place with great interest.
“Don’t be scared, don’t be scared. This is the Ten Thousand Buddhas Grotto. It’s very safe. I know there are nothing but heads in the niches, but every one of these Bodhisattvas is the real thing.”
As he spoke, Ao Run raised his stark white bony tail and pointed toward a bald head high above. “See that? That’s Ksitigarbha. And the cute little ornament beside him? That’s Diting. Little Friend Qin, that little fellow is practically a kindred spirit of yours. Both of you are exceptionally good at judging good and evil. Though from the rumors I’ve heard, its personality is probably easier to get along with than yours, hahahaha…”
“Mm, it really is…” Qin Shu settled a little. This was one Bodhisattva he genuinely recognized. His parents had taken him hiking and visiting Buddhist temples when he was little, so he had long since seen many famous Bodhisattva images.
Yuxu had no interest in sightseeing, and she had already seen this place when she was young. She was far calmer than Qin Shu. Moving efficiently, she took out a small mountain of spirit stones along with a few life-force crystals she had snatched from Dragon Mother, then began laying a formation deep inside the cavern.
“Please wait a moment, fellow daoists. Ao Run, don’t rush. Help me build a safe zone first.”
“With me here, what are you still afraid of—”
“Come here. Give me the dragon pearl.”
“All right, all right.” Ao Run’s objection failed. He scampered over obediently, looking perfectly delighted to be ordered around.
Dragon aura surged, and the spiritual formation was completed in the blink of an eye. With a Dragon King assisting beside her, Yuxu’s casting efficiency had clearly risen enormously.
While the safe chamber was still being built, Qin Shu turned and wandered around the spacious cavern. By the light of the dragon pearl, he narrowed his eyes and carefully examined the densely packed niches, picking out several faces he recognized.
Ao Run had been right. The Ten Thousand Buddhas Grotto really did contain proper Bodhisattvas. Such grottoes traditionally carried an auspicious meaning, symbolizing that all beings could attain Buddhahood, and these vast ranks of Bodhisattvas were precisely those awaiting that attainment.
Even so, Qin Shu still found the atmosphere inside the cavern deeply uncomfortable. Some of the Bodhisattva heads had been carved with expressions that could only be called ferocious, their faces livid or twisted, their huge eyes staring straight at him. Wherever Qin Shu went, he vaguely felt as though they were watching him relentlessly.
Rationally, he understood that some divine statues were deliberately carved in fierce forms to frighten away evil, while some Bodhisattvas were simply responsible for fighting and naturally looked terrifying… But Qin Shu still felt that something was wrong.
He should not have felt this uneasy and strange, this creeped out and unable to sit still. He was not an evil spirit. He was the exact opposite of one!
“Zhaozhao, what do you think of the atmosphere here?” Qin Shu therefore asked Pei Zhao in a low voice.
“…Comfortable.” Pei Zhao was also inspecting the stone images. He frowned slightly at the question. “That’s a little strange. I usually feel uncomfortable in front of Buddhist statues.”
Exactly! If they really wanted to put it harshly, Pei Zhao was the one who counted as an evil being, and even a super-king of evil beings at that.
These densely packed Bodhisattvas should have been frightening Pei Zhao and making an existence like him feel sick all over. Instead, every bit of that effect seemed to be landing on Qin Shu. The natural order had practically flipped upside down.
“I suspect Zuo Zhe tampered with this place back then.” Qin Shu frowned as well and stopped conserving soul power. He fixed his full attention on the most frightening head. “Give me a moment. I’ll take a look.”
See Through, but the advanced version. Recently, Qin Shu had worked out all sorts of ways to use soul power on his own. They counted as baby-level new soul arts, and only soul cultivators capable of opening the Heavenly Eye could use them.
He had not bothered giving them any grand names. As long as he himself could remember what they did, that was enough.
The Bodhisattva image enveloped by See Through happened to fall squarely within Qin Shu’s soul-art specialty… He stared into its vicious, hostile stone eyes. After several breaths, those seemingly dull stone pupils gradually revealed a strange, inhuman smile.
Rustling whispers followed, mixed with faint snickers and sobs. There seemed to be people screaming and roaring hysterically as well, madly chanting ancient Sanskrit. Every sound echoed from far away, muddled beyond recognition.
These noises were old friends by now. Qin Shu raised an eyebrow, completely unafraid. He even reached out and poked the smiling eyeball. “Do you need help, Bodhisattva?”
Bang!
He had barely finished the question when a huge explosion rang out.
One poke had been fine, but on the second, his finger directly made the Bodhisattva head explode.
Although it looked like a stone carving on the outside, the thing was more like an inflated balloon wrapped in a thin, brittle shell.
Once the shell broke, the complicated mass of soft flesh inside lost its protection and became fragile and sensitive… Qin Shu could pop it casually with a single finger.
A thick, foul-smelling mass of black slurry gushed from the exploded head. The stench of old blood mixed with the corpse-reek of rats and a whole series of indescribable fermented odors.
Qin Shu stared at the sludge running down his fingertip and fell silent for a moment. He instinctively wanted to take a deep breath and steady himself, but had to forcibly stop. He spoke faintly instead. “I am a civilized person. I have manners. I am a very civilized person… I want to chop my hand off. Zhaozhao, help.”
Pei Zhao hurried over to rescue him. He took Qin Shu’s wrist, calmly pulled out a handkerchief, wiped him clean, then even applied some hand cream he had not used in a long time.
Seeing how miserable Qin Shu still looked, Pei Zhao silently put on several more layers. “Better?”
“…Mm.”
“Apparently not much better.” Pei Zhao looked thoughtful. “You need a new protective artifact for your hands. Give me a moment.”
He rummaged through his storage space and pulled out a pair of gloves stolen from Dragon Mother’s treasury. In appearance, they were very similar to the pair Qin Shu had once taken at the subway station: thin as cicada wings and resistant to even the fiercest poisons.
Qin Shu eagerly put them on and tested the feel. Strangely, they really did feel familiar. His mind, which had nearly gone blank from disgust, finally began working again. “They’re so light it barely feels like I’m wearing gloves… Come to think of it, could that foreigner’s artifact from before have been supplied by the Dragon Palace too?”
“Yes. I stole a whole crate. They all look like this. Their protective effect is decent, but they’re too thin, so they can only be treated as consumables.” Pei Zhao nudged him aside as he spoke, put on gloves of his own, picked up a fragment of the broken stone head, and carefully rubbed and examined it. “It looks like Zuo Zhe swapped out many of the Buddhist statues in the Ten Thousand Buddhas Grotto and replaced them with filthy things like this… Help me find every remaining one. Before we enter the void, we have to clean them all out.”
“What does doing this get him?” Qin Shu sighed and obediently went to work.
“If he replaced only a small number of divine statues and no one ever noticed, the consequences would eventually become disastrous. After years and years of sitting here, their auras would mingle and seep into one another… These filthy things would eventually become part of the Ten Thousand Buddhas Grotto’s ecosystem and gradually be accepted as the same kind by the other divine images.” Pei Zhao sighed. “Divine statues have spirit, but in the end they still can’t be counted as the actual thoughts of the gods themselves. They’re stupid.”
“Once the filthy things are accepted as the same kind and integrated into the ecosystem here, the remaining statues will gradually be contaminated by them.” Qin Shu picked up the thought in sudden understanding. “And the step after contaminated divine statues… is contaminated Bodhisattvas.”
“Mm. He really is smart, and cautious too. He even knew to choose a place containing only Bodhisattva heads.”
Pei Zhao accepted another false statue Qin Shu had found and looked at the finely carved stone face, which could only be called kindly and benevolent. He could not help sighing. “If there had been a true Buddha here who had attained fruition, if there had been complete full-body Bodhisattva statues here, if this had not been the East Sea Dragon King’s territory with so many different auras mixed together… his little arrangement would have been discovered immediately.”
But judging by how thoroughly concealed these false statues already were, Zuo Zhe had been on the verge of succeeding.
The auras of the real and false statues had nearly mingled into flawless harmony. Neither Ao Run nor Yuxu had sensed anything wrong with the atmosphere.
Besides, the Ten Thousand Buddhas Grotto had deliberately leaned into a more unsettling design from the very beginning in order to intimidate evil beings. Feeling uncomfortable while hundreds upon hundreds of heads stared at you was perfectly normal… Hiding genuine filth inside that discomfort was also an extremely clever psychological trick.
Fortunately, although Zuo Zhe was extraordinarily cunning and endlessly devious, Qin Shu happened to have very good eyes.
By the time Yuxu finished constructing the spherical safe space, Qin Shu had already found every abnormal Bodhisattva image and piled them beside Pei Zhao for centralized disposal.
He swallowed several Soul-Restoring Pills sponsored by Daoist Lord Sifang and hurriedly sat in meditation to restore his soul power.
Working for so long had genuinely taken a lot out of Qin Shu. If he had not built up such strong resistance to mental contamination, he might not have endured it at all. A soul cultivator without psychological preparation could very well run into something filthy like this and immediately suffer cultivation deviation.
What a tiring mess. This was the power of a scourge surviving for a thousand years… Relying on Daoist Lord Sifang’s potent high-grade pills, Qin Shu hurriedly finished recovering.
The moment he opened his eyes, he found all three of them sitting around him. Ao Run had returned to human form as well, staring intently at Qin Shu as if watching a monkey at the zoo. Every pair of eyes was fixed on him.
“…Hello?” Qin Shu said weakly.
“Lord Zhaoyuan already explained the situation to me. You worked hard, little brother. Want to rest a little longer?” Ao Run patted his shoulder. “Good thing you have those eyes. Otherwise… my eldest brother could’ve died without ever knowing how, and the future of the East Sea might have been ruined in one stroke.”
“It’s what I should do. We can’t afford mistakes in today’s operation either.” Qin Shu hurried to his feet and rolled his tight shoulders and neck. “If we get Eldest Brother out and then accidentally bump into something inside the cave that triggers the contamination, that would be even harder to clean up.”
Pei Zhao put all the filthy things away. What exactly he intended to do with them was unknown. He tilted his head at Qin Shu. “Rested enough?”
“Extremely well rested.”
“Good.”
In the next instant, Pei Zhao vanished from everyone’s sight. Yet the familiar sense of his presence still lingered beside Qin Shu.
“Oh-ho. A thousand years apart, and Lord Zhaoyuan’s strength has improved quite a bit.”
Ao Run raised an eyebrow, clearly fascinated by his first time participating in a retrieval operation. His arm was already draped across Qin Shu’s shoulders as he tugged him toward the spherical space, repeatedly looking him up and down along the way. “I can’t tell where he is at all. Can you see him?”
“If I don’t deliberately look, I can’t see him either.” Qin Shu smiled. “By the way, he actually doesn’t like it much when I put my arm around people outside…”
“Oh? Hahahahaha, you should’ve said so sooner! Don’t get your uncle killed.” Ao Run’s scalp prickled. He hurriedly laughed awkwardly and withdrew his arm, then led Qin Shu to the center of the formation.
This was Ao Run’s first time joining them, but he could contribute far more than the white dragon. Yuxu was still responsible for controlling the formation core and supplying power, while this time Ao Run could not only assist her, but also help Qin Shu navigate and locate people when needed, strengthening the spirit-guiding formation.
That was because he was connected by blood to the Dragon Kings and had spent more than long enough inside the void. Admittedly, it had left him with severe psychological shadows… but at a time like this, even serious psychological problems had to stand aside for the moment.
Qin Shu genuinely admired him. If Qin Shu himself had been gnawed down by the void until only his head remained, dragging a white skeleton through absolute darkness and loneliness while quietly waiting to die, then after being rescued he definitely would not have instantly turned into the high-energy, full-blooded person Ao Run was…
Looked at another way, having Ao Run beside him as support multiplied Qin Shu’s sense of security.
Qin Shu sat cross-legged with practiced ease, closed his eyes, entered meditation, and linked his now-recovered divine sense to the formation spirit as he looked toward the void.
This thick, complicated chaos was an old acquaintance too. It was not frightening in the slightest. Even more surprisingly, Qin Shu discovered that his divine sense had grown wings as well, two dark crescent moons merging seamlessly into the magnificent blackness.
Now that he could fly, his forward speed increased by an enormous amount. Qin Shu was clumsy at first. Whenever he tried to use the wings, he felt strong resistance and stiffness, completely unlike the illusory resonance Ao Run had given him in the sky earlier.
But following the golden light of dragon aura as it guided him forward, Qin Shu discovered that this endless darkness was the best training ground he could have asked for.
His speed gradually increased. Along the way, Ao Run faintly detected the ripples of hurricanes and could warn Qin Shu to make sharp turns midway, switching onto safer paths.
With bloodline as their guide, the search was extraordinarily efficient this time. At the end of the spreading dragon aura was an enormous azure dragon curled tightly into a ball. The pull of the spirit-guiding formation wound around him, but he remained completely motionless, as if he had no intention of following it forward.
Detecting Qin Shu’s rapid approach, that tangled mass of blue-green, impossible to distinguish head from tail, finally showed a more striking color. A familiar pair of golden slit pupils snapped open and locked coldly onto Qin Shu.
“What are you?”
“Hello, Eldest Brother.” Qin Shu stopped and answered by voice transmission. “No, wait, the generation is wrong. It’d be more appropriate for me to call you Eldest Uncle… I’m here to get you out. Can you move on your own? If you really can’t, I can drag you along.”
“Why should I trust you? Your soul aura is strange and incomplete, and your cultivation realm is nowhere near sufficient. You should have been crushed into dust by the void, yet you can wield this much dragon aura to protect yourself.” Those golden pupils grew colder, full of scrutiny and suspicion. “Those wings are even more suspicious. Whose dragon pearl is in your hands?”
“…Lord Zhaoyuan is my boyfriend.” Qin Shu rolled up his sleeve in exasperation and exposed his wrist. “If your eyesight is that good, how about taking another look at this red thread? You’re the eldest brother in the family. You should’ve known long ago who Lord Zhaoyuan liked, right? Look. Isn’t it me?”
“You’re the Xiezhi?! Weren’t you already—”
Ao Guang cut himself off halfway through. After a brief silence, he slowly unfurled his immense azure body, vast as a mountain range, and flew toward Qin Shu. He circled around him, looking him over from every angle, his vigorous voice rumbling like thunder.
“Your third life, then. A human shell, yet not merely ordinary flesh and blood. Everything a Xiezhi ought to possess is still there. Good. With the body of heaven’s favored child, your path will be smoother than it was back then… This time, don’t take that child to his death with you again.”
“Can we not speak in riddles, Eldest Uncle?” Something in Qin Shu’s chest inexplicably tightened at those last words, and he answered irritably. “My soul really is incomplete, so I don’t have any memories from my previous lives at all. I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Either explain it clearly or just don’t say it.”
Ao Guang fell silent again for a moment, then let out a long sigh. “When Fengdu collapsed and the world’s fractures first appeared, the earth veins shook without rest. The cities and land at the heart of the Nine Provinces all fell into the void, leaving behind only an enormous, savage abyss that endlessly swallowed every living thing nearby. That was what truly deserved to be called hell on earth… Still, there was a fine tale in it too. Nüwa once mended the heavens, and later you and Lord Zhaoyuan used your own bodies to mend the earth and returned a stretch of fertile land to the mortal world.”
“…Huh?”
“Is that clear enough? The East Sea was struck by catastrophe at the time as well, with tidal waves reaching the heavens. I had duties of my own and was unable to go rescue you, so I only learned the general course of events.” Ao Guang stared at Qin Shu’s shocked face and continued quietly, “You were born of the creation of heaven and earth, so naturally you had the ability to fill a fracture with your own body. It was your duty, and I thank you on behalf of all living beings beneath heaven. But all these years, there is one thing I have never understood… Why did Lord Zhaoyuan disappear into the abyss together with you?”
Qin Shu’s thoughts were in complete turmoil, but none of it showed on his face. He stared back at Ao Guang with perfect confidence. “Have you considered that maybe it’s because he’s insanely in love with me? No one has ever loved you that much, so of course you couldn’t figure it out.”
Ao Guang: …
At last he had made this fierce dragon wear a blank expression. Satisfied, Qin Shu turned around and spread his wings, flapping them twice with imperfect control. “How about following me out first and asking Lord Zhaoyuan yourself what he was thinking? Come on. Staying in the void too long isn’t safe. Follow me.”
Obviously, Ao Guang was in far better condition than Ao Run had been. Although he had been lost in the void for a long time and the color of his scales was slightly dull, the dragon was full of vigor.
He was the Eastern Azure Dragon, born with an immense life-force that towered over almost everyone else, a level beyond even Yuxu’s Evergreen Art. Not only was he extraordinarily hard to kill, even if someone tried to exhaust him to death through exile, it would take hundreds or even thousands of years.
That made Qin Shu’s task much easier. Following the pull of the formation, he smoothly guided Ao Guang back into the real world.
“Eldest Brother!”
Ao Run’s roar startled Qin Shu. Qin Shu had only just steadied himself when Ao Run lunged over impatiently, wrapped his arms tightly around the azure dragon’s thick neck, and started feeling him all over for wounds while wiping away tears.
When brothers linked by blood reunited, naturally there had to be hugging, catching up, and anxious checking on one another. It was an extremely warm family reunion. Ao Guang could not even start discussing serious matters. He had no choice but to stand there and let his fourth brother hug and cling to him until Ao Run’s emotions were soothed.
Qin Shu did not disturb them. He turned to Pei Zhao, who had reappeared, and his gaze deepened. “We died together in my last life?”
He asked directly. Ao Guang had already explained things clearly, so there was no point hiding anything.
Pei Zhao blinked and said softly, “You dragged me in and made me die with you. You said… you alone weren’t enough. You needed to add my whole body of dragon flesh before the hole could be patched tightly enough.”
Qin Shu froze. The turmoil inside him abruptly stopped. There was a boom in his head, and he even had the illusion of ringing in his ears.
He could not speak. He could hardly believe it, but he knew Pei Zhao would not lie. That faint phantom ringing therefore grew even stronger. Pei Zhao kept talking.
“Back then I still had all those god-binding chains on me. You’ve seen them. Every movement hurt like hell, but you didn’t care at all. You forcibly dragged me out of the Heaven Cell and jumped into that black chaos, plugging the hurricane from the void… As we got close to the hurricane, we both became hideous. You even mocked me on purpose and said we looked like two lumps of bloody meat jammed together inside a meat grinder.”
Pei Zhao spoke quietly, lowering his eyes slightly. “I didn’t mind being killed by you. Dying together was fine too. But at the very end, you protected my soul. You pushed me back into the human world and took only my flesh and blood with you.
“I didn’t know what you meant, Qin Shu. I really hated you back then.”